


The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman

by landofspices



Series: Only Our Dark Does Lighten: canon-based episode tags [5]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Stockholm Syndrome, Unrequited Guy/Marian, poor Gisborne siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 11:20:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6801646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landofspices/pseuds/landofspices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag for "Bad Blood". We're unconvinced that Guy is capable of surviving without food and sleep. It seems unlikely that being tranquillised twice would ... help with that. Takes place in the gap between 3.10 and 3.11, and explains how they get those horses! </p><p>This is hurt/comfort with canon pairings (Robin/Marian; Robin/Isabella; Guy/Marian is unrequited), but it's still highly Guy-sympathetic: if you hate Guy, you probably won't enjoy it. Only Guy and Robin appear in the story itself.</p><p>[tw: alludes to the abusive relationship between Vaisey and Guy, including references to rape.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman

**Author's Note:**

> For Eve. Yay, I'm finally back & can catch up on all the fic I missed! 
> 
> This story contains extensive anachronistic (obviously ahaha) use of the KJV, simply because I really didn't feel like using Biblical Latin and the story's in English, so I decided to use the most resonant and well-known English translation.

_Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad,_  
_the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in_  
_the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages,_  
_eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and_  
_the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the_  
_standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to_  
_tithing, and stock-punished, and imprisoned; who_  
_hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his_  
_body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear;_  
_But mice and rats, and such small deer,_  
_Have been Tom's food for seven long year._  
_Beware my follower._

– King Lear: Act III, scene iv

 

It has come to this: two men in a timeless forest, one of them putting out his hand. Gisborne's hand in his. Cold and fine-fingered, a strange thing. Black tree trunks glisten with damp all about them. The fire has sunk into itself, an orange pit.

Gisborne, offering his open hand.

Robin gets up onto his feet. When he woke he was stiff and thick-eyed. These things do not matter. He walks close by the dying fire, and away again. His muscles unfurl as he moves, into their familiar places. His feet find steady places in the leafmould and the earth of Sherwood. Step here, Robin Hood. Where you've never been lost.

Bewilderment clouds his heart like fog: it scarcely seems to beat. Is this the man who did not kill my father? Gisborne's eyes and nose are pink in the firelight and he looks young. Robin thinks, he wept. In the shadows beyond the fire, Guy was weeping. I didn't hear.

It is the last thing he wants to feel, but chilly pity splashes about inside him. _You know about the fire._ Those words in Gisborne's voice, and he'd broken in, insisted it was no secret: I will speak, that's what he'd meant. You don't have to say this. You can stop now.

He knows too much about Gisborne's suffering. That death he wouldn't grant: the merciful cruelty I showed you, he thinks, the terrible mercy. You are the only person on this earth whose anguish I would never have thought to ease, before tonight. It's not a pleasant contemplation, here in the night-dimmed glade where they stand alone. That fire is all fires, as it dies out in a slow, lovely sputtering of ash and light. Starving, as flame ever is, it softens itself, becomes a glow, a ruby. And your mother burned, and your father burned, and mine did not.

Guy's hair is damp with sweat. By the last light Robin sees it. Derision rises bitterly in his mouth; he wants to say, you were afraid, and you can't deny it, look at you. It's been cold for hours, coward.

The dark hair clings around Gisborne's pale face, in disarray. Robin kicks soil across the embers, his foot knocking efficiently. One, two, three. He's done it many times. He says nothing as the darkness closes in, and he hears Gisborne's breathing quicken.

Robin can't say he is sorry, not for any of it. Marian lies between them in the gleaming, never-ending sand, with her dress bloodied, her lips not wholly closed. With Djaq's fingers shutting her eyes.

He recalls Guy's pinched, wet face. Isabella's was unrecognisably contorted. He has never before thought of them as children, but now he sees two little hands clinging together and their feet stumbling on the road. Three stones were thrown. And he was glad to see them fly from work-roughened hands: one, two, three. I can't do this, but they will do it for me. You, the ill-omened; the bringers of nothing but sorrow; the killer, the Frenchwoman's boy: is that witch-blood, sparking in your veins?

We cast you out, as the stomach doth ill meat.

*

Who is to choose the path? Not Guy of Gisborne, that lost one. The blue-eyed man who is false. He knows nothing of Sherwood and its subtle lore, its foliate, ripe loves. Where can he put his feet. There are no safe places. He carries the dark with him, like the black leather coat he wore to be married in: heavy, all wrong.

_Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever._

Robin moves in fleet silence when he is alone, a thing of green and grey, shadow to shadow in his buckskin shoes. No use with Gisborne for a companion: a man exhausted, a man startled by the birds' wings when they begin, high above, to stir. Robin saw his shaking hands and his milk pallor, before they were felled together. His stupid bravado betrayed everything: not eating, not sleeping, haunted at every turn. Now is the time to be kind, set a slow pace. Do as you'd do for any other man. Robin Hood, isn't that who you're supposed to be?

If it weren't for Marian. Who lies spilt between them in the sand, a riot of colour. Your cheeks as white as her dress, Gisborne. That unlooked-for shroud, which Djaq stripped from her, to wash her. And then, you know, she was dressed in it again, bound up as if with a great sash. There were no Western women's clothes and I would not see my wife buried in Saracen robing.

The darkness is easing into a bruised gloom. How like a dream, Gisborne silently following him. Without plaint, without plea. He asks Robin for no halts, accuses him of no trickery. Is this trust? Robin thinks not. It seems more like resignation: he has given himself over to marching on uncertain feet through the dawn with his enemy, in a place he detests. Gisborne's tenure with the Sheriff, Robin is unsettlingly aware, demanded a notable capacity for endurance.

He did not set a swift pace. He has not driven Gisborne on like a beast.

They are close to Locksley. The light is waxing strong enough to see, and Robin stops, he says, "Wait. Stop here." He would touch the arm of his companion as he spoke, if it were Much or John or Will or Djaq or even Allan. Lord knows what Gisborne would do at that, how he would come undone. Robin sees a face drained of colour, skin drawn tight over familiar Gisborne features. He's known them in boy and man, in girl and woman. Bedraggled hair sticks to Guy's cheeks and brow. His eyes and nose are swollen, you can still see he has shed tears: on that white skin the traces show for hours.

"We're near one of the villages," Robin says. He's certain Guy doesn't know which one. "Wait here for me." No need to say where he is going, or why. Better, indeed, if he doesn't. But as he turns away there's a gasp quickly cut off and he looks back.

Into Gisborne's empty blue gaze a trace of questioning, of doubt, has come. For a long moment he looks at Robin, breathing heavily. At last his eyes drop, and he says, "Are you going to come back?"

"Of course," Robin says. "If you've learnt anything, you should know that by now. I always come back."

*

He watches Robin slip away, vanish into the leafage. How cold the morning, and heavy the dew. Guy looks at it, pooled in leaf upon leaf. It wets the forest floor and the trunks of the nameless trees. I should stay standing, he thinks. I'll be even colder on the ground.

It does him no good. The shame of faltering beneath Robin's gaze kept him going, but Robin has taken leave of him. Guy's legs are hurting, trembling. He's weary past weariness.

He is couched on the dew-wet leaves. He isn't sure how he got here, and his gullet aches with a yearning to sob, to give up all restraint. But Guy's body is too dry to bring forth more tears. As they walked in the rustling dark he cried out to his mother without forming words. Maman, Maman, Maman. Her silken skirt brushed his cheek. To undo this life, and be in her chamber once more. He is shuddering in the misty air. Held in a skirted lap, your hair brushed aside. The absolute softness of that. Nothing in the world hurting you. He retches and bile wells in his mouth. He spits weakly, tries to clear the bitterness, but it trickles down his chin.

Guy wants to lie down in the Sheriff of Nottingham's bed and be called comely, the blankets settled over him with a gentle hand. He wants to have a cup of sweet wine at his lips again. The birds set up a wailing in the trees above him. I didn't kill, he thinks. I didn't kill. I didn't kill. I began the fire, but I didn't kill.

He wants to be beaten for a small transgression. To have tears stroked from his cheeks. Not to be here, in Sherwood Forest. He wants to stand in Knighton Hall again with a torch, and set it aside. He wants to be prone, with fingers plucking him open little by little. He wants to curl in a lap, to be kissed, to take ship for the Holy Land. To put his clean blade lightly into the sand and walk away.

*

Locksley is child's play. Robin is up the wall and in at the window like the suitor in a fabliau. Upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber. Only Gisborne has no lady: no one looks into those dazed blue eyes of his and thinks, _ah, my love, my dear, my pale dove, my young hart._

Robin stands in the bedchamber that was his. The air is stale. I am not Earl of Huntingdon, he thinks. For surely my father is still living, and he has not been stripped of his title. He touches the looming bed-frame, which has never changed, not once in his lifetime. Its wood feels cold to his fingers. The first night I lay here, not letting myself weep. I thought of my father dying bravely. How the Gisbornes must have cowered and shrieked as the flames rose higher.

He marks the hole left by one of his own arrows, and thinks of Gisborne somewhere in this room, flinching as it thunked in. Robin remembers how he staggered and reeked of drink. Why did I let him live, make him live: why did I not shoot him, when I followed him in the Forest. There is absolutely no good answer.

All Gisborne's things are still here; as a prisoner he needed nothing. Robin silently collects a jerkin and breeches; shirt, linens; as much money as he can carry. And then he opens the last chest, a small one: the ring is there, in a swaddle of dense grey velvet.

It's alone. Gisborne has cared to save nothing else, not here. Not in this chest with the finest carvings and the sweetest cedar scent. Robin's hand dips, touches cool metal. He could take this too, and offer it. He could put it on his open palm and hold it out to Guy, saying, with this ring, I bind thee to all that is good. To all that is pure. As you desired to bind yourself.

Is anyone so fine a man, so free of heart? He folds the lid of the chest down, and his eyes are burning. Not here, not now. Marian, my lily of the valley. Give me peace.

*

For a cold, dilated moment, he thinks that Gisborne is dead. He's nestled around himself like a child in the womb, entirely still. It looks like surrender. Robin kneels next to him in the half-dried dew and touches his hollow cheek.

"Guy," he says. He hears his own uncertain voice. Is this what you hoped for, going on by yourself.

He is not a fine man, he is not free of heart. But he's not that man either. Guy's dew-wet hair covers one closed eye and he's been sick: his face is stained with bile. It's not a fine end, but there are few fine ends. Robin cups his hand loosely over Guy's mouth and nose, and the faint drift of a breath rewards him almost immediately.

No sense rousing him in the open, close to Locksley. And yet to settle him over a horse without hurting him? That's not easy, a tall man in a swoon. Robin alternately blasphemes and prays in all earnestness to the holy martyrs for their aid, since Gisborne can give him none whatsoever. The morning brightens imperceptibly, minute by minute. It looks with laughing eyes on all their troubles. Robin mounts behind Gisborne, settles the slack body against his own, and takes the reins of the other horse in his left hand. He's sweating and his blood hums to him. Why, Robin, why. There's still no answer.

*

It's very dark when he wakes and before he can restrain it, a cry comes from his lips. It is in French, the language of sleep for him, but not courtly French. The truth is this: he calls out unknowingly in the baby French of his childhood, and the words break on his lips as he remembers to be ashamed of them.

Don't whimper, Gisborne, it's unbecoming of a man. You cannot speak thus to a lady or a lord. Are you a man grown, or aren't you? Prove it. Prove it.

A warm hand has closed around his wrist and he pulls at it frantically.

"Stop it, I'm not hurting you," someone says, and it sounds like Robin. "We're in a cave. The camp was too far, and I'm not taking you there until I know if you'll try to betray us."

Guy's breath catches. It is Robin holding him and everything is true. He closes his eyes to make a double darkness. Robin is saying something about horses and Locksley, clothes and wine, fainting and a bag of money. He cannot follow along and his mouth is too dry and foul to ask questions. A wine-skin pushes at his lips and he swallows, swallows, swallows.

Robin says, "That's enough, you'll be sick again. I really don't feel like mopping you up."

It probably was enough to poison him, which would be an easy way out. If only Robin did things like that.

*

He cannot wait in a dim cave for somebody to wake and not think of her. He had thought her dead, and she came back to him from that dissembling sleep. He saw her eyes open, and in the gladness of his heart saw the light that only life gives returning to her face.

_My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her._

Guy is restless. He murmurs in his odd stupor and his eyelids flutter. Robin guesses he has slipped from unconsciousness into a sickly sleep, as the time drifts towards noonday and still he twitches and moans under the skins Robin has tucked round his cold body. If you ever try to tell me again that you don't need food or sleep, Robin thinks, I will describe this morning in detail. There will be no escaping it, Gisborne, you insufferable bastard.

He thinks of her leaning upon him at a cave mouth, weakened by loss of blood. And yet still she thought she'd marry you, thought she'd have to. He had no idea who it was: it would kill him if he knew it was me. Her very words. All the irretrievable things: like the scent of her hair, which he's never found again since they laid her down in the sands.

I would break my word to my father, if I could. If I could do it, and still be myself. I would do anything to escape you.

As he is hardening his heart, Guy wakes. Robin cannot pretend those choked words were not frightened, and he clasps his hand round a shaking wrist. He explains where he went: it doesn't matter now they've moved on. "And since I came back to find you in a dead faint, Gisborne, I brought you here. I've got food and wine for us, since it seems your theory of man's subsistence is not without its flaws."

Guy doesn't answer. He gives it up: feeds him wine in careful rations, holds the skin to his lips. Takes it away.

The Locksley pantries are still well-provisioned, in the absence of any master. Robin breaks white bread apart. When he takes a small piece between his fingers and puts it to those cracked, half-parted lips – and this is mercy, his greatest mercy, seeing Guy limp on the ground and not raising a hand in anger – Guy turns his head aside.

"You think I'd poison you," Robin says. "For heaven's sake, Gisborne. I could've finished you off hours ago, why would I bother doing it this way?" 

Guy's hand comes up slowly and touches Robin's. He takes the bread in his cold fingers and eats it on his own.

Gisborne pride, Robin thinks. Damn them all, with their wide shining eyes and their beguiling faces. Isabella has borne out everything they said about her mother, hasn't she? French witch, with something of a devil's grace about her. He thinks of her watching Guy on the scaffold. Did she remember it, how they stood in the middle of the ashes. That astounding grave that her brother set a-going, that tomb of fire. They twined their hands and ran. He heard her sobs. She has never said a word about it.

She has let him kiss her, suck at her beautiful Gisborne mouth, and kept her own counsel. Never any reproach. Does she recall the stones that flew at them in the ashy air? One, two, three.

He's still too depleted to sit up, but to let Robin help him? To accept mercy? Oh, Lord forbid it.

Robin puts a second scrap of bread into Guy's hand. Now that we have broken bread together, I don't know what to think of you. Whether hatred or pity will have the upper hand with me, in the end.

*

The second waking is violent. He thrashes his arms against confinement and hears his own voice raised in a wail that does not stop. Lying in the cabin, ceaselessly rocked by the sea, he keened. Now a hand strikes his shoulder. "Quiet," Robin says. "Be quiet. Stop."

Lying in the cabin, pitiless tides carried Guy away. He is shivering. A moment ago he knelt in the sand and took Vaisey's prick in his mouth: working hard, doing his best. Marian was at the far edge of his vision. She stayed silent, spinning one of Hood's grey-fletched arrows in her beautiful, strong hands. She watched him at work. Vaisey spilled in his mouth and bent down to hold Guy's face between his palms. On his left little finger he wore Ghislaine's ring.

"Drink this," Robin says. Guy has grown used to the dimness; he can see that Robin is frowning. He sits up gingerly and takes the offered wine-skin. It's wet and sour, wonderful in his mouth.

He doesn't know what to say to Robin. What has he said in sleep? That troubles him most. They cannot stay together, they cannot. Every unguarded moment is a risk: he will say something, do something, betray himself. I, Guy of Gisborne, the murderer, the near-as-nothing regicide. The fourteen-years' catamite who still dreams of bedding your wife. I've dreamt of mouthing your prick, do you know that, Robin Hood? I've dreamt that I begged you to spare me the fire-hot sword and you said, certainly, if you will but attend to me in your fashion. And I gave way to you.

If you would be so kind as to call upon your wrath again. Bring forth your knife again. Would I be afraid? Yes, I think I would. On the scaffold I was, to my surprise, afraid. All the same, Robin. I wouldn't say no.

"It's dusk," Robin says, "We're not going anywhere tonight. I brought clothes for you from Locksley – see, there they are – if you think you can stand up. I won't play manservant to you."

Guy is able to rise. He casts off his stained shirt and replaces it. He puts on the tunic, turns away from Robin and peels his breeches and linens away from his skin. No water to wash away this sweat and filth. It's strange, repellent. For an instant he is a child again, with a dirty face and long matted hair. His mother's pride and joy. This is everything he wanted to forget.

He dresses as fast as he can, surprised that Robin keeps his silence. There is no jesting now. Guy can stand upright if he steadies himself with a hand on the cave's stony wall. He turns to Robin. "Is it safe to go outside?" he says. "I need–"

"Safe enough in the way you mean," Robin says. "Isabella's men won't look for you here. Whether you can stay on your feet and conscious, though ... I wouldn't lay money on it."

Guy ignores him and walks cautiously towards the blue dimness that is the cave mouth. He hears Robin's quiet footsteps behind him and the shame of weakness – swooning in front of Hood, and he has always, always thought you were nothing – is sharp in his throat. "I don't need an escort," he snaps.

"I'm not going to watch you." There's laughter, imperfectly suppressed, in Robin's voice. "Just doing my knight in shining armour duty, ready to drag you back inside if I hear you crashing to the ground."

His face burns. The cool evening air is full of rustles and skitters. The distance between the trees looks deep purple, not lightless but getting that way. Guy is shaking with weariness.

Robin puts a hand under his elbow on their way back into the cave.

"There's cold meat,' he says. "From Locksley. I got into your larders again. Come and sit down."

Your larders, Robin. We can give up this game, can't we.

*

He dreams of Marian, running in the Forest. The flicker of leaves, pale green, obscuring her for a moment, then letting him see her again. She stops in a clearing, suddenly. Robin, she says. The roof of thy mouth. Robin. Thine eyes.

He is all still and fleshless. In dreams like this, the flesh doesn't matter. I have broken bread with him, Marian. He says those words, each one distinct and quiet.

She bows her head with a private smile.

Robin wakes. At first he doesn't know what split the shell of his sleep. Where is she, where is Marian? Oh, she lies far away in her little cradle. It is dry there. She will never be as cold as he, when he takes the tomb.

It is Guy, moaning in slumber. Even now, you take these echoes from me. When you don't mean to do it, you do it still. Look at you, in your murderer's sleep.

And I broke bread with you. And when the sun rises, I will not have slain you.


End file.
